The use (and abuse) of opiates, archetypally opium and morphine, have been known since antiquity (reviewed in Brownstein, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 90:5391 [1993]). Since the nineteenth century, chemical characterization and synthesis of a number of morphine analogues have been achieved in an effort to discover a compound with the analgesic effects of morphine that lacks or is substantially attenuated in its addictive potential. These efforts have proven fruitless to date.
The biology behind the reasons why morphine and morphine-like compounds display both analgesic and addictive properties was first elucidated by the discovery of endogenous morphine-like compounds termed enkephalins (See e.g., DiChara and North, Trends in Pharmacol. Sci. 13:185 [1992] for review). Accompanying this finding of an endogenous opiate was the biochemical evidence for a family of related but distinct opiate receptors, each of which displays a unique pharmacological profile of response to opiate agonists and antagonists (See e.g., McKnight and Rees, Neurotransmissions 7:1 [1991] for review). To date, four distinct opiate receptors have been described by their pharmacological profiles and anatomical distribution: these comprise the mu, delta, kappa and sigma receptors.
In 1991, U.S. pharmaceutical companies spent an estimated $7.9 billion on research and development devoted to identifying new therapeutic agents (Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association). The magnitude of this amount is due, in part, to the fact that the hundreds, if not thousands, of chemical compounds must be tested in order to identify a single effective therapeutic agent that does not engender unacceptable levels of undesirable or deleterious side effects. There is an increasing need for economical methods of testing large numbers of chemical compounds to quickly identify those compounds that are likely to be effective in treating disease.
This is of particular importance for psychoactive and psychotropic drugs, due to their pharmacological importance and their potential to greatly benefit or greatly harm human patients All treated with such drugs. At present, few such economical systems exist. Conventional screening methods require the use of animal brain slices in binding assays as a first step. This is suboptimal for a number of reasons, including interference in the binding assay by non-specific binding of heterologous (i.e., non-receptor) cell surface proteins expressed by brain cells in such slices; differential binding by cells other than neuronal cells present in the brain slice, such as glial cells or blood cells; and the possibility that putative drug binding behavior in animal brain cells will differ from the binding behavior in human brain cells in subtle but critical ways. For these and other reasons, development of in vitro screening methods for psychotropic drugs has numerous advantages and is a major research goal in the pharmaceutical industry.